A film built inside a Joseph Cornell shadow box. Lightning takes the Abbey of Averbode in 1499, and among the very first things the monks pay to replace is the clock — because it did not only tell the hour, it sang it.
It is the night of Friday 24 October 1499. Thunder is moving over the Abbey of Averbode in the southern Low Countries, and at eleven o’clock — as the bells toll to wake the brothers for Matins — lightning strikes the abbey church. The fire takes bells, relics, stalls, paintings, the organ, a precious bible.
While the ashes are still warm, the abbey begins to rebuild. And among the very first things it pays for is a new clock. The account books survive, and they are specific: payments to bell-founders who sifted the ashes for salvage metal, and to clockmakers who did the repairs. The same records note what the clock played on its bells — on the hour, Sancti spiritus adsit nobis gratia; on the half hour, a chant in honour of the Virgin.
That is Champion’s argument in one object. Medieval and early modern societies are usually described as timeless. They were nothing of the kind. They organised time, measured it, argued about it and paid for it — and mechanical sounding clocks like Averbode’s spread across Europe, through the reformations, across the Atlantic, and into Asia with the missionaries.
The whole film happens inside a Joseph Cornell shadow box. Everything in it is physically real — the brass bells on their iron chains, the exposed clock mechanism, the manuscript pages pinned to the walls, the ash on the floor, the single candle. Everything except the people. The monks, the bell-founders and the clockmakers are flat paper cut-outs lifted from illuminated manuscripts: hand-coloured, ink-outlined, two-dimensional figures standing in a three-dimensional world.
That contrast is the point. The objects survive and the record survives; the people reach us only as the page drew them. And between scenes the film travels through the mechanism itself — in among the escapement wheels and the hairspring — never past the same gear twice.
The film opens on the mechanism itself, floating in the dark with no room around it — iron tracery, architectural columns, enormous wheels turning slowly. It is held long enough to be looked at properly, the way you stand in front of something in a museum that stops you. Then the camera moves forward, between the wheels, and comes out the other side inside the box.
Inside the box: the skeleton clock on the back wall with its gears showing through the dial, bells hanging on iron chains, abbey records and Gregorian notation pinned across the walls. A single flat monk stands at the base with a candle at his feet, looking up. The hands read just before eleven.
Lightning hits during the bells for Matins. This is the only saturated colour in the film and the only shot that leaves the box entirely — the fire is simply too big for it. Then it stops, and what follows is the most complete silence in the piece.
The orange is gone and everything is ash-grey. The manuscript pages are curled at their burnt edges, the bells hang without moving, the candle is out, and a fallen bell lies on its side in ash that keeps falling like snow that will not stop. The clock's hands are frozen at eleven. In this film the figures move only when the mechanism moves — so nobody moves at all.
New figures arrive, and they are not monks. Bell-founders and clockmakers, cut from guild manuscripts, doing exactly the work the records describe — one crouched over a crucible where salvaged bell metal is beginning to glow, the first warmth earned back from the fire; another with his hands on the gears. Behind them, fresh pages are pinned up: names, amounts, dates. The records name them and the figures embody them.
When the clock comes back it does not merely tell the time, it sings. The bells swing, the brass trembles with the strike, and fine ash lifts off the bronze and hangs in the amber light. Somewhere behind them a pin-barrel turns, tripping the hammers in order — a machine that has a song written into it. There is no narration here. The chime is the narration.
The skeleton face is alive: every wheel turning visibly behind the numerals, the hands keeping their proper pace again. The flat monks at the base turn their painted faces upward. Roughly a century and a half after the first tantalising records of mechanical clocks, an abbey in the Low Countries has just paid to be told the hour in music.
The film follows the object outward, and each stop is built as its own box. Here the religious statues are down and the whitewash is up — but the mechanism stayed. The clock simply changed owner: it now belongs to the city rather than the abbey, and the figures below it are burghers rather than monks.
Carried by missionaries across the Atlantic and into Asia, the same technology turns up in the Ming court — a European clock at the centre of a Chinese picture plane, with two registers of cut-out figures meeting around it. Time, in this film, is not a background condition. It is a thing people made, paid for, argued over and carried.
Matthew Champion is a historian of premodern temporalities — how people experienced, perceived and shaped time. The Dan David Prize selection committee praised “Champion’s original and imaginative work that demonstrates how time is both given to and shaped by individuals, as well as noting the way he brings his lived experience as a musician to bear on his deep engagement with the sounds of life and the pluralities of time.”
Each year the Foundation selects its winners and, with the help of the laureate, chooses the subject of the film they are being honored for. The Foundation’s team, who know that work intimately, help bring it to the page, and we turn it into script, image, register, and motion.
The one thing we keep from them is the film itself. It is made in their honor but held back, so that the first time Matthew Champion meets it, in animated form, is the evening of the prize — the very moment they are being celebrated for the work it depicts. That is the part of the project we love: a film that is also a gift, a surprise, revealed in the room where it does its work.
The Dan David films don’t end their life on the evening of the prize. After the ceremony they travel to YouTube and to the Foundation’s own website, where each one sits alongside the committee’s reasoning for choosing the laureate and further material on the research. The winners are interviewed once the films are public, and those interviews are woven into the published versions.
You care about your subject.
So do we.
Client: Dan David Foundation
Subject: Prof. Matthew Champion
Direction: Daniella Koffler
Animation: Moofa Animation Team
Year: 2026